Why Customers expect you to understand their needs

With the ever increasing development of the leading ecommerce shopping basket and shopping habit management, your customer truly expects to be led to their product more and more.

The increased expectation from the consumer, both in B2C and B2B puts an increasing demand on businesses to meet the need and stay in touch with the cutting edge of retail service.

The Ecommerce Customer

Managing B2C ecommerce needs for abandoned shopping carts, preferred products/categories, wish-lists and linked items, has become more prevalent in most retailers. There are few who would not have embraced this functionality to date.

However, linking this with a multi-online presence to collate a customer’s purchases and habits is often still managed in a disparate manner.

B2B commerce is becoming ever more expected, with the additional expectation to manage order history, track lead times and provide customer level pricing and contract terms. All of this is expected with the clean commercial view that we expect from traditional B2C sites.
It is imperative that businesses offer this easy route to purchasing for the modern day buyers who expect a 24/7 ability to access their orders.

Mobile and Tablet access

It is also important to manage the accessibility to your website by all modern methods. Again this is driven by customer expectation, but also by the drive to keep your business at the forefront of the end consumers’ thoughts.
A responsive website is almost expected in the modern retail world to be viewable and functional on mobiles and tablets.

The end goal is almost inevitably to have your site available through an app that can be made available to your end customers to enable you to drive notifications and promotions directly to them. This is a seriously undervalued element when looking at B2B options.

Ecommerce to Instore

Taking the expected functionality a step further, customers are also beginning to expect the translation and availability of information to be in store.

The full retail experience should now be looking to capture the end user wherever possible with a link to their history, viewed items and even open/abandoned carts to maximum both your average sale and also the customer experience.
The final piece to manage this end to end experience is the ability to view stock across all locations and the capability to order there and then, if out of stock in the default location. This removes yet another barrier to purchase and maximises value per sale.

Centralised Management

The real value of all of the above elements are truly recognised when managing this all through a single database, providing a truly global business view of the customers in real-time. Ideally managing B2B, B2B2C and B2C throughout with all of the variations and varied requirements that come with each channel.

Modern retail is changing, buying habits are changing…are modern retailers adapting in time?

Contributor

NoBlue

NoBlue specialises in developing and implementing tailored cloud-based business IT solutions based around the NetSuite product. NetSuite is a single solution to support all of your back-office processes – bringing together your accounts, customer management, stock management, eCommerce and more – into one database.